The earthquake zone witnessed a mini-information revolution immediately after October 8, 2006. This could well have changed the media landscape of the area had the trend not been nipped in the bud

By Adnan Rehmat

When Pakistan's worst natural disaster struck on October 8, 2005, over 73,000 died -- including 30,000 children in classrooms -- more than 100,000 sustained injuries and 3.5 million were displaced, according to official estimates. The earthquake of 7.2 magnitude on the Richter Scale devastated large swathes of Pakistan-administered Kashmir and North West Frontier Province .

One of the untold stories of the disaster is that the quake hit a region in which independent local broadcast media did not exist and information was tightly controlled through the state-owned radio and television. Even 'local' newspapers were, and still are, printed outside the region, mostly in Rawalpindi and Islamabad . An open media policy allowing for private ownership of the airwaves in Pakistan , instituted by Islamabad in late 2002, had largely bypassed Kashmir .

Nevertheless the earthquake had a devastating impact on the local state controlled media in affected areas. Dozens of journalists were injured or went missing, and newspaper offices and press clubs were destroyed. The only source of mass information -- the state-run Kashmir Radio and TV -- was silenced by the earthquake: 40 of its 160 staff were killed, and its buildings wrecked. The business of local news generation came to a halt. The disaster presented the classic paradox: news about the calamity and its impact was going out to the world at large, but those affected -- at least 3.5 million people -- had no means of finding out what was going on, what to do or how to get help.

The information gap

To gauge the state of information access, the Pakistan office of Internews Network, an international media development NGO, conducted a snapshot survey two weeks after the earthquake in Battagram, Balakot and Mansehra in NWFP, and Muzaffarabad, Bagh and Rawalakot in Kashmir . These were generally the worst-hit cities. According to the survey, before the earthquake about 81 per cent of households had a radio and 52 per cent had television sets. Of these, three-quarters of radio sets and virtually all TV sets were destroyed by the earthquake. When asked about their sources of information, 68 per cent of respondents said they were dependent on word of mouth, 28 per cent on the radio, 21 per cent on newspapers, 15 per cent on TV and 11 per cent on the local administration. At least 8 per cent said they were not getting any information from anywhere. No one mentioned the mosque or religious leaders as a source of general information.

In the absence of conventional sources of information, rumours abounded: such as about when the next earthquake was due, or that daubing kerosene on your tent will rid you of mosquitoes, or that bottled water was medicinal and only fit for hand-washing, not drinking. Against this background, it was imperative that a cheap and practical means of information access was established.

Rebuilding the media

Radio was the obvious answer: sets were cheap, information could be provided in local languages, and broadcasts could reach large numbers of people. Given the lack of local equipment and expertise, operators elsewhere in the country had to be called in. Acceding to lobbying for this platform by stakeholders of the emerging broadcast sector, within a month, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) responded gallantly by issuing 10 temporary non-commercial emergency licences to private FM stations just outside of the affected area. The Authority bypassed the usually lengthy process of security vetting of would-be operators (to clear them of links with India or with jehadi/militant groups), and made available frequencies usually controlled by the military. The idea was that, since the licences were non-commercial, they would be taken up only by 'serious' volunteer broadcasters committed to helping people.

Within weeks of the earthquake, Pakistan Emergency Information Project was launched to rebuild media capacities affected by the disaster in Kashmir and NWFP. This work primarily included developing the emergency broadcast sector, building radio production facilities, providing small equipment grants to emergency FM stations, training journalists in humanitarian reporting and the production and distribution of a daily one-hour news and information programme on humanitarian issues, called 'Jazba-e-Tameer' ('The Spirit of Reconstruction'). The programme was produced by a group of ten journalism students. The volunteers travelled daily across the earthquake region to report on relief efforts, including feedback from affected populations, the international and local humanitarian community and government authorities. The radio programme itself was broadcast by the seven emergency FM broadcasters that eventually went on air across the entire disaster zone.

Four months after the initial information access survey, Internews conducted a follow-up. This showed that the new community radio regime had rapidly become a major source of independent, reliable and useful information. In the initial survey, in late October 2005, 28 per cent of respondents had cited radio as one of their primary sources of information. In the follow-up survey, this had gone up to 70 per cent, and respondents mentioned at least one of the seven emergency radio stations on air at the time of the survey as their station of choice. The follow-up survey also revealed that more people were consuming more media.

There were also indications that the platform created by the Jazba programme was playing an important role in mediating opinions within the affected communities, diluting, for example, many of the least tolerant religious views regarding the presence of international relief agencies -- and of their female employees in particular -- in the earthquake zones.

Transformed public sphere

Early in 2006 PEMRA extended the emergency licences for 10 FM radio stations beyond an initial two months after the quake, in acknowledgement of their important contribution to the relief operation. Four months later the government media regulator PEMRA issued a set of full permanent commercial radio licences and invited applications for local terrestrial television channels. These developments appeared to be laying the groundwork for a more pluralistic media regime in an information environment that had been tightly an information vacuum.

In recent months, however, there have been signs that the unprecedented media space that has opened up in the earthquake zones is already under threat. The daily radio programme, Jazba-e-Tameer -- the only region-wide platform for information and debate on the relief and reconstruction effort -- went off the air at the end of June 2006 because of shortage of funds despite requests from listeners across the Kashmir and NWFP for the service to continue. The broadcasts were curtailed as donor grants limited solely to the emergency response period had expired.

In July 2006, emergency broadcasters in Abbottabad (NWFP) and Muzaffarabad ( Kashmir ) received a series of threatening calls from some religious groups to stop airing "Western values being spread" by aid agencies. In at least two instances, their broadcasts were forcibly disrupted by cutting off cables. In August 2006 an FM broadcaster in Balakot (NWFP) -- that aired a diversity of views on official plans to relocate the city, many of them critical -- was forced off the air. In the same month the government quietly ordered all emergency FM radio stations to cease operations by mid-October.

In the same month the religious leaders in Bagh ( Kashmir ) gave a September deadline to dismiss all local female staff from the city, failing which NGOs should close their operations.

Danger signs

The re-emergence of religious intolerance in the disaster-affected areas to pressurise the broadcasters and aid community and the ill-timed government decision to encourage the emergency FM broadcasters to go quiet combine to stunt the progress of a healthier public information sphere. A large information gap at a crucial stage of reconstruction and rehabilitation process will be created with the closure of the emergency stations in early November 2006 and the time it takes the commercial stations to come online and develop capacities to inform people.

The decision to shut down this reliable information regime is disappointing considering that it represents one of the better success stories of the disaster response in the quake-affected regions in Pakistan and managed to achieve the following:

* Improved timeliness, accuracy and credibility of information flow to affected population.

* Increased relevance of information reaching local populations.

* Increased reach of information to isolated, information-dark areas.

* Improved two-way communication flows between affected communities and the recovery operations.

* Increased flow of information from the earthquake zones via media to policy-makers and to the general public.

* Empowered local populations -- through the inclusion of their voices in the media.

* Ongoing international attention on the needs of affected populations.

* Increased understanding of the role of local media in emergencies.

* Increased space for independent media and professional journalism

Lessons learnt

A year after the earthquake several key lessons are becoming apparent:

* Information about relief, reconstruction and rehabilitation is critical for survival and recovery in disaster regions; and that, if the local media lacks the capacity to provide the kind of specialised information that is needed, outside help must be provided, and swiftly;

* Government authorities and the international development community lack a policy framework for the role of local media in disaster zones and need to embed strategies for local media support into the mainstream mechanisms of their relief efforts;

* Media support measures in disaster zones need to go well beyond the immediate emergency response phase and continue into the reconstruction period;

* Further research is needed on the accountability and efficiency gains of investing in media and communications support in disaster zones;

* Crises in controlled information environments often present opportunities for opening up the public sphere and allowing a diversity of voices to debate key issues central to the recovery of communities. These openings, may prove to be shortlived, however. They are more likely to take hold if external support through local and international media assistance organisations is provided on a continuous basis in the opening fragile phases;

* Abrupt phase-out of emergency stations in the absence of a parallel emergence of a commercial broadcast sector will stunt moderate messages and create an information vacuum that may be captured by extremist voices.